The Grinns Tale

Release Date: July 14, 2012

Publisher: Nexon, 6Waves

Developer: Nexon

Genre: RPG, Strategy

Sponsor:

The Grinns Tale is Facebook game from Nexon, the maker of Cloudstone, Kartrider Dash. Featuring gothic style fantasy world, strategy-based campaign and role-playing monster killings, The Grinns Tale brings a wholly new social gaming experience on Facebook.

Review:

The Grimms tales would be among the last things I would have associated with strategy games. That is why I was surprised when The Grinns Tales proves to be one such title. But it didn’t disappoint me.

The characters and structures, though in small sizes, are adorable. Heroes, villagers, and monsters (excluding some special monsters in really big sizes) are all small and cute. But since their heads are rather large compared with their mini bodies, you can still watch their facial expressions and realize how happy or how hungry they are.

Just like in many other strategy games such as Armies of Magic and Tynon, you would have to build dozens of structures in The Grinns Tale. Build more bungalows and homesteads to accommodate more villagers, upgrade the Hero Tower to recruit more heroes, construct bakery to produce food, and set up logging camps and mine to produce wood and rocks, which are necessary for every construction, upgrade, and production.

There is this tower which monsters dwell in and which you will explore floor by floor. Basically, that is still dungeon crawling, only this time you are about to do it perpendicularly, not horizontally. Every floor consists of several rooms, each with some monsters to battle against or a chest of special item to claim.

As you progress, you would have more heroes battle for you. They are of various classes: cleric, wizard, archer, adventure, and knight and therefore acquire different skills as they level up. But no matter how many skills or abilities they could learn, every hero could only make use of two or three skills. That is to say, whenever a new skill is unlocked, you need to select the one you prefer and forget about others.

In each battle, you have a maximum of three heroes in the formation and three in the standby team. You have to pay close attention to the HPs of those heroes and how hungry they are. Once you feed food to or use potion on any character, you will have to wait until the cooldown time expires before you are allowed to use next item. If any of your characters is dead, you could hold it and then swap it with one standby hero.

The Grinns Tale sports a click and drag gameplay. In the homeland, for example, you could click and drag a hero to accelerates the construction or production of some structures; while in the monster tower, you have to drag your heroes to the battlefield, drag them to swap heroes, and drag to determine their attacking targets respectively. Honestly, I’ve never thought that the dragging stuff would work fantastically on PC.

If there’s one thing that disturbs players in the Grinns Tale, it is the long waits. You could assemble villagers to speed up the constructions and productions. But that wouldn’t help much. You still have to wait for hours for crops to ripen and for constructions to be complete. Nonetheless, that is fair enough given that the game has no energy system whatsoever and the only things that would keep you from making progress are the waits and the shortage of wood.

110110 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.dotmmo.com%2Fthe-grinns-tale-11011.htmlThe+Grinns+Tale2012-07-16+10%3A27%3A54Sara+Lauhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.dotmmo.com%2F%3Fp%3D11011 on The Grinns Tale